So It Goes

I don’t know if art imitates life or life imitates art. Once exposed to an experience presented to you by an author or director that experience becomes of part of your consciousness. An image becomes a memory, a memory a series of images, clips that run on loop indefinitely sparked by a smell or a sound or another memory. I walk down a road, rifle slung over one shoulder, right hand on the grip as it swings by my leg. The sky is the sky, but browner. The pavement is the pavement but grittier. The mud is mud but it fucking sticks to everything. My eyes are mine but also they are cameras panning back and forth filming the first cut of my own little movie. And that’s how it feels. It’s your life, but it’s 2-D, a caricature exaggerated but familiar. But there’s always something missing. You left it in a box back home in a storage unit with your clothes and your pictures. You taped down the card board flaps and wrote do not open for one year.

You know it’s a defense mechanism and you find comfort in routines. Get up, work, eat, go to the gym, shower, eat, repeat. It’s a little like what you imagine prison to be. You watch a movie and see so many parallels between you and the inmates that it makes you a little angry. And it’s only the first three weeks. Weren’t you just here a year ago? Why does it smell exactly the same, like burning garbage and dust? It feels a like a waste of time because you aren’t privy to the big picture, the little piece on the big board. You hear gun shots in the distance, sometimes in the not too far distance, honking horns, engines, and you think of L.A.

You see signs of violence. And you hear the stories, the lob-bomb attacks back in March, the Green Beans coffee trailer burning down, the JDAM building. It’s huge. The biggest building on the FOB and it’s got a hole in the middle of it like God put his fist through the roof. It used to be the Defense Ministry building. Republican Guard central. They used to interrogate people and then toss them out the top floor windows. Now it’s a gutted sagging hulk, an early victim of the shock and awe. A few buildings over there is a small square jail with an open inner court yard. The windows of the guard towers at each corner have long since been broken and sections are cordoned off with C-wire because they are structurally unsound. They say there are Chinese characters written on the walls inside left there by slave laborers brought in to build the surrounding compound. Saddam threw a banquet for them when the buildings were completed and had them all executed. So the story goes.

It gets late and even though you’ve worked a full day you find it hard to sleep. It’s a bit cramped and the walls are paper thin. Literally they are made of cardboard in areas. Nothing you haven’t been through before. A sheet strung up for privacy and you’re set. Your own little section of the world built to ward off casual invasion. You still can’t sleep so you write. Send it off, maybe people read it. You know they do because they write you back and it feels good to know you’re being thought about. But you still wonder if you made the right choice sometimes.

Usually you come back around to the same conclusion you always do when you have too much time on your hands. You did this because you were getting lazy and complacent and you’ve never learned anything if it wasn’t the hardest way you could possibly subject yourself to. And what’s worse than making the wrong choice? Making no choice at all.